Emotional Resilience

"Success represents the 1% of your work which results from the 99% that is called failure."

Soichiro Honda

Yesterday, I attended a lecture held by School of Engineering on Selling and Negotiating for Technical Types. The presenter was Prof. Lynette Ryals, a professor of strategic sales in School of Management, Cranfield University. She was one of the only two professor on sales in the UK.

She started her presentation by stating that selling was a skill that everybody should have. She added that  researchers needed the skill to sell themselves and research ideas. She also stated that recent tendency showed more sales people were coming from technical position. So, it was important to have salable character.

She said that one of the most important character we should have was emotional resilience. The sign of the character was a gut of "I can do it! I will do it!". Someone with emotional resilience would bound very quickly from state of failure. From statistic, she tried to convey that people in top positions in many organizations reached the positions not because they were cleverer than others but simply because they had that character of resilience.

Listening to the presentation, I measured myself, "do I have this kind of character?"

Well, I am still pondering about it.